Writing

A Fatal Exception Has Occurred! Digital Journal Goes Down. Yikes!

Back-up, Back-up, Back-up!!! In the world of technology we all know this to be true. Whether or not we actually implement it, even though we know we should, when the servers go down it can have a major effect on a business.

Digital Journal, a social news site that pays it’s users to report the news, has been unavailable since midnight Thursday. If you’ve tried to access the site, you were probably greeted by this message:

“Digital Journal has a tech headache

We are currently experiencing technical difficulties and are working to resolve them
We apologize for any inconvenience.”

Double ooooops!

In the world of technology, up-time with your servers is a major concern for anyone who hosts websites. But when your servers go down, it can have a major affect on your business. WordPress knows this and does a very good job of keeping it’s sites, both the free ones and the paid ones up and running. You can read some of the news here and view some pictures here.

Digital Journal is used and viewed by many people, whether they are writing articles for the site or just getting a daily dose of the news, visitor to the site do so regularly, almost obsessively “to get their DJ fix”. It’s almost like… a day without Digital Journal, is a day without…. well…. the news of course.

As a concerned person and an avid reader of Digital Journal, I was a little worried for my friends at DJ. We all know that equipment fails sometimes, but being part of the DJ community, and with all the weird stuff going on in the world lately, I wanted to know that my friends were safe and sound, working hard on whatever the issues are. So I decided to send the Editor-in-Chief, Christopher Hogg and email to ensure it was a hardware issue and not some other God-forbidden catastrophe.

His reply:

“We have a data recovery team working on a few failed hard drives, but it takes quite a bit of time to swap drives and bring everything up again — we’ve been working non-stop since about midnight on Thursday.

Unfortunately, DJ will be down probably for most of the day today (we’re hoping to have it up by late tonight but it depends when our data gets recovered fully). We’re at the mercy of getting new parts and implementing all of the backups, etc. so I apologize for the inconvenience. The nature of technology these days is that we can only move as fast as it takes new parts to arrive and data to be recovered.

Thanks for your patience.”

Whew!!! The folks are OK and as any committed team can be, they are working hard to restore their servers. I must admit I was relieved to know they were OK. I feel like they are a part of the family, friends and family. I know that may sound weird to some of you, but even the people blogging here at WordPress , know what that means. When you frequent the forums, leave comments, and talk to other users, you make a connection…. even if it’s only in cyberspace; relationships are formed, friends are made and bonds are cemented. That’s the same at Digital Journal. It’s more than a news site, it’s a community of users who come together for the purpose of reporting the news. You can’t help but get to know them and form a bond.

But for me, this could not have come at a better time. People get so addicted to “working the internet”…. blogging or looking for the latest news to report, that it is easy to forget there’s a whole world out there..(I really need a laptop).. especially when working from home…. LOL…. The temperature here in Toronto, has gone from a measly 5 degrees… with snow and rain two days ago, to a very sunny, very bright, very balmy *cough* hot 19 degrees…at least that’s what the weather pixie (on the left) indicates. It’s supposed to get to 22 degrees and will stay up there till late next week. Yahoo!

Wow…. what happened to spring? I guess it’s over! As long as the sun is shining…. I really don’t care what the temp is. So I’m outta here… for now….

Edit: Oh yeah… when your typing away, don’t forget to save your work on a regular basis. Or get some really good software that automatically does it for you…. Like BlogDesk. When things go wrong… a fatal exception will happen… as it did just now. THANKFULLY BlogDesk saved my work when just that very thing happened. I’ll tell… I was a little panicked while my desktop rebooted. But all is well. Thanks BlogDesk 😉 You Rock!

Good luck to my friends at Digital Journal. Hope you come back online soon 🙂

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21, 2007 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Hmmmmmm, Writing.
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